Thursday, June 13, 2013

Does an
unvarnished truth exist? And, if so, does it intersect, even slightly, with
what one might call good? Those questions are at the core of Margarethe von
Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, a heady film that is
only superficially a biopic of the famed political thinker, “Martin Heidegger’s
favorite student” and one-time lover, the first woman hired to teach at Princeton.
Arendt has opened in New York &
Los Angeles, after having been nominated for & won a number of awards, in Middle & Eastern Europe, including two German
best actress nods for Barbara Sukowa as Arendt.

Although
the film has flashbacks to Arendt’s days as a student in Marburg, von Trotta focuses
on the few short years of Arendt’s career in America after the capture of
Adolph Eichmann, whose trial she “covered” for The New Yorker, resulting in a series of articles published in book
form as Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The drama of the film itself occurs not in
capture of Eichmann, which happens in the first 30 seconds, nor in Arendt’s
relationship with Heidegger, nor even in the trial itself – though this may
well be the heart of the movie – but in the revulsion with which Arendt’s
reporting is met by her closest friends at Princeton, in New York, and
especially in Israel.

Arendt,
who fled to Paris as the Nazis came to power, was briefly interned in a French concentration
camp at Gurs near the Spanish border, from which she escaped and eventually
made her way to the US. Alluded to but not represented in the film itself
(which is more than can be said for much of her writing, her work with Karl
Jaspers, her friendship with Walter Benjamin, her first marriage, or her work
in Germany after the war), von Trotta presents Arendt as wanting to understand
this ultimate evil by staring it in the eye. Her friends among the US exiles
are wary of her trip to Jerusalem to report on the trial for a readership that
cannot be expected to comprehend their experiences of horror, a sharp contrast
to the almost boyish enthusiasm of New
Yorker editor William Shawn (portrayed by Nicholas Woodeson doing everything
he can to mimic Wallace Shawn, who might have been better cast to portray his
father). Her husband thinks the trial itself is a travesty of justice. In
Israel, her friends are frank about the political nature of the prosecution. Israel,
she is told, needs myths.

Arendt
arrives half-expecting to find a monster on the dock in the glass cage built to
protect Eichmann during the trial, but finds only a weasel, a logistics
bureaucrat with a permanent smirk across his face. The moment of brilliance in
this film is von Trotta’s decision to let the audience see just what Arendt
did. Archival footage of Eichmann and the trial are liberally interspersed with
the reaction shots of the world press trying to file articles under deadline.
In dramatic contrast to Eichmann, who claims he was only following orders and
that to follow orders in a time of war is the highest duty of any man, even
that he has no hatred of Jews, he was simply doing his job to the best of
his ability and his job was to ensure
that trains filled with Jews arrived at the camps, we see testimony from many
of his accusers, overwhelmed & destroyed by their experiences, throwing
themselves on the floor of the courtroom, unable to continue, spectators equally
unable to contain themselves, calling out in court, cursing the defendant. None
of this is done via reenactments.

Arendt’s
reaction is a curious one. If she has any connection to the emotional
devastation of the victims, she doesn’t show it – later in the film she will
say point-blank that she does not love the Israeli people, that one does not
love “a people,” one loves individuals as she does her friends. Arendt however is
fascinated by the fact that she believes Eichmann is completely serious when he
says that he is not guilty, that he was only following orders. Evil flows
simply from the willingness to do one’s job, to be honest and efficient, even
trustworthy. It is not the individual who does evil so much as it is the whole
system once that system has gone bonkers. Which must mean that anyone
implicated in the system equally bares the blame, whether it is the man who saw
that the trains were full when they arrived at Auschwitz and Dachau, or the
Nazi-appointed Jewish leaders of the various ghettos, such as Chaim
Rumkowski of Łódƶ. Even though someone like Rumkowski, who voluntarily
boarded his own family on the last train to Auschwitz, may have been killed by
the other inmates on his arrival, suggesting that there were Jews complicit in
the Shoah generates a visceral reaction. Arendt is rejected by many of her
friends. Mossad sends agents who demand that she not publish the work in book
form. Her colleagues at Princeton want to strip her of her classes. Norman
Podhoretz is snarky & mindless.

Which
leads to a Big Final Scene in which Arendt addresses the community in a lecture
hall, tying the picture into too procedural a bow as a lone female stands in
for the film audience watching Arendt hold her ground, looking worried when
Arendt is attacked, happier when Arendt parries a verbal assault. In film cliché
terms, Arendt is good, but she’s not Atticus Finch.

Hannah Arendt is almost a great motion picture because it raises
profound issues and for the most part leaves them there out front for all to
see. It is impossible to view this movie without contemplating what the true
cost of Israel’s founding myths might be for everyone in that region of the
world, how the pillaging of communities and expulsion of a population to a
destiny in camps can be viewed as anything other than the most obscene of
ironies, but not something that anybody raised in a nation predicated on the
genocide of several already existing native nations can project any political
or ethical superiority about. There is plenty of blood for everyone’s hands
here. Von Trotta, a German filmmaker living in Paris, is not unmindful of the broader
implications.

So it is
impossible to view this movie in 2013 without thinking of the pending
prosecution of Dhokhar Tsarnaev, the so-called Marathon bomber, who not only
may have been led into his act in Boston by a violent and manipulative older
brother, but who never even thought about the need to get away. How separate
him from the politicians who choose to conduct war via unmanned aircraft,
conduct foreign policy by proxy through comprador regimes everywhere in the
world, and execute their plans via technicians who go home at night to their
families in places like Denver? There is never a drone strike anywhere in this
world that doesn’t hit home in America at the same time. It’s not like we haven’t
given wannabe jihadi more than a few reasons to be pissed. One could argue that
only a purist of fundamentalist dimensions might opt out of such a system, but
remember that Ralph Nader gave us George W Bush. Perhaps it’s not the banality
of evil so much as it’s ubiquity.

In Arendt, the key figure in the question
of complicity isn’t Adolph Eichmann at all, but rather Martin Heidegger, who as
a brilliant professor in his late 30s seduced (or was seduced by) a young woman
17 years his junior. Von Trotta emphasize Heidegger’s opportunistic sexual
abuse by choosing an actor for the role who is in fact in his 60s, but she is
more reticent in articulating a position on young Hannah Arendt’s actions as
student-seductress, going to her professor to ask him to teach her how to think
(one of the great come hither lines of all time, that), inviting him up into
her room. The film is quite frank that the exiles around New York never have
been particularly monogamous. Arendt’s husband spends the night with one of his
students at Bard, but is still portrayed as loving and loyal. Arendt chastises
Mary McCarthy for characterizing her fourth husband James West as a “good man,”
unlike every male character in McCarthy’s own books. Everyone in their circle
already seems to know about Hannah and Martin, some are even said to be jealous.
And Arendt is seen chastising Heidegger post-War for his snuggling up to the
Nazis, telling him that his actions made her sick even as he blathers on -- imagine Heidegger blathering – about his
continuing love for her.

Von
Trotta isn’t making a case about the slippery slope of moral relativity. The
emotional damage of the Holocaust remains pretty much in black-and-white. There
is no documentary footage of backhoes pulling up hundreds of skeletal corpses
from mass graves. There is no scene where Arendt mourns that failure of Walter
Benjamin to make it over the border into Spain. Von Trotta seems very much to
buy Arendt’s argument that one can’t love an abstraction, even if one can kill
for one. Heidegger was an opportunist, an instance of very small thinking
indeed. Whether Arendt was one also, even if in a contrarian mode, von Trotta
leaves pretty much for the viewer to decide.

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Ron Silliman was born in Pasco, Washington, although his parents stayed there just long enough for his mother to learn that one could step on field mice while walking barefoot through the snow to the outhouse, and for his father to walk away from a plane crash while smuggling alcohol into a dry county. Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Revelator from BookThug, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 14 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize,from the Poetry Foundation. His sculpture Poetry (Bury Neon) is permanently on display in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, and he has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley, although he now lives in Chester County, PA. In 2015, Silliman taught at Haverford College & theUniversity of Pennsylvania & was writer in residenceat the Gloucester Writers Center.